Fans of classic radio have been in mourning for, uh, let me count—eighteen months!—since the cancellation of Lambert & Janecek on KTLK-FM. Few shows reliably delivered the level of suspense that one did.

Do you ever for second worry that Paul Allen will leap across the table and strangle Jeff DuBay before a live mic? Lori and Julia? Moon and Staci? Well, Lambert & Janecek—with yours truly taking on Sarah Janecek (a well-known local lobbyist, Republican insider, and publisher of Politics in Minnesota) as well as every drooling, flat-earth wing nut who could steal their mother's cell phone—was bona fide moment-to-moment, life-and-death drama. The next sound you COULD have heard was gunfire, never mind that Clear Channel explicitly bans firearms from its studios.

I mention this because FOX9 has invited Sarah and me out for a reunion of sorts tonight. We'll begin on the FOX9 website live at 8 p.m. and then appear periodically on TV from 9 to 11, offering our deep thoughts on Super Tuesday returns from Minnesota and the rest of the nation. I have already begun toning up my bloviation skills. (Do you think I should begin with a reading of the bill for the impeachment of Dick Cheney? Or should I save that for after California comes in?)

The phenomenal rise of Barack Obama and the run up to Super Tuesday—the closest thing to a national primary in case you haven't heard—got me wondering about how local veterans plan to cover not just tonight but the rest of this campaign, assuming that Obama's campaign continues on for weeks to come, which seems an absolute certainty. The contrast in Saturday evening coverage between the 20,000 who packed into the Target Center (for SEVEN hours) as opposed to the 700-800 who turned out for Mitt Romney in Edina couldn't have been more stark, yet in the interest of balance most of the locals, TV and newspapers attempted to split the pie equally. (Love the Strib subhead Sunday describing the "overflow" crowd for Romney. If he had held his event in a parked Escalade, they would have been "safe" and "fair" and "balanced" in calling that an "overflow" event, too.)

The tricky ground for any political reporter trying to play fair is describing the scene—and what's driving it—without enhancing what is clearly an extraordinary-to-unprecedented wave of enthusiasm for a political candidate.

The two top dogs in local TV coverage are WCCO's Pat Kessler and KSTP's Tom Hauser. (My—and everyone else's—old drinking buddy, Neal Justin of the Strib, cruelly referred to Kessler as "the 3000-pound gorilla" of political reporting. That, sir, is both low and cold. Kessler turns the scales at no more than 2,250, 2,500 tops.)

Kessler conceded that what is going on with Obama—the surge in polls across the country throughout the past two weeks, 20,000 people of every imaginable age and ethnicity in the Target Center, a 50-50 chance of taking out Hillary Clinton in California—"creates a difficult balancing act." On the one hand, polls and rallies in February don't necessarily translate to victory in November. On the other hand, if you're a veteran observer of political wars, of the numbing corniness and faux hype of political campaigns, you sense immediately that there is something qualitatively different going on here. (The sight of street-styled hip hop guys, kids you'd usually figure for gangbangers or worse, jumping up and down at a political rally is something you don't see everyday.)

"It is definitely possible that there is something unusual going on here," says Kessler. "Young people are coming out, and the energy level is like something I've never seen before. But the news judgment has to be on the facts. And I think we have an advantage there over the papers because of the pictures. They tell the story."

But isn't the detectable phenomena—polls, crowd size, and composition—a legitimate part of an "objective" story?  "Oh, absolutely. I've been telling people the only thing I can compare this to is Wellstone and Ventura, but neither of them approached the size of this. I mean, the guy walks on stage, and it's like The Beatles at Met Stadium."

KSTP's Hauser was putting together a piece on local TV buys for Monday night's news when I called. (Obama—flush with cash—was the only candidate to buy local broadcast TV.)

"Obviously we can't really say what our opinions are. But when you look at these things empirically, you can see what's going on. But polls have a way of being wrong. Look at New Hampshire. But there's no question [Obama] certainly has momentum."

(Hauser, by the way, will have the DFL Senate candidates on his Sunday At Issue program for a mini-debate.)

The sense from both Kessler and Hauser was that they are both being careful to modulate the narrow ground between "reporting" the obvious and injecting tacit expressions of something extraordinary going on in the normally formulaic American campaign process.

My point is that they would be well within the unwritten "license of objectivity" to make more emphatic notes of the unique dimensions of the Obama surge. This is big-time different and rare, and, therefore, worthy as news. Although were they to "punch" the extraordinariness of Obama today, they would inevitably open themselves to accusations of "liberal bias" from those kids waggling their Romney baseball mitts and arguing that their guy will deliver the change America sorely wants. (Is it just me, or is most of what Romney embodies, the craven impulse to exploit any loophole and game any system for narrow personal advantage pretty much whatever every other candidate—McCain included—is trying to change away from?)   

Kessler's boss, WCCO news director, Scott Libin says, "This past weekend was a good example of the problem. You've got one guy talking for an hour to 20,000 people and another talking for ten to fifteen minutes to maybe 800. It's hard to treat them equally. But what we're telling each other over here is to remember that our reporting has to reflect reality—polls and crowd size being real numbers—, and 20,000 is a bigger number than 800."

Lord knows this thing has a long ways to go. But even the 3,000-pound pros will have to ask themselves if the standard rules apply if this situation continues on as it has.

Anyway, back to the top: Lambert & Janecek redux. Tune in. 8 p.m. on the Web. 9 to 11 p.m. on TV. I'm the one who is not blond.